Fluttershy — LessWrong

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Replying toThe Power to Judge Startup Ideas

What the hell? It's just a more specific version of the point in inadequate equilibria, and don't you want to know if you can do something better?

Replying toThe Power to Judge Startup Ideas

Fluttershy6y

The Power to Judge Startup Ideas

Presumably the reason why people are roleplaying everything in the first place is because, you'll be seen badly if you stop roleplaying, and being seen badly hurts if you don't have enough emotional resilience. Here's my best attempt at how to break people out of this.

Replying toThe Power to Judge Startup Ideas

Fluttershy6y

The Power to Judge Startup Ideas

Man, most people are roleplaying everything. It's not fixable by just telling them what concrete stuff they're doing wrong, because they're still running on the algorithm of roleplaying things. Which is why rationality, an attempted account of how to not do stuff wrong, ended in a social club, because it didn't directly address that people are roleplaying everything anyways.

Replying toWhat is the state of the ego depletion field?

Fluttershy7y

What is the state of the ego depletion field?

Nice, but the second paper is less on track, as the idea is more "people, society etc. coerce you to do things you don't want" than "long vs short term preferences".

Replying toWhat is the state of the ego depletion field?

Fluttershy7y

What is the state of the ego depletion field?

Not something you'll see in papers, but the point of willpower is to limit the amount of time doing stuff you don't want to do. So, your community has some morality that isn't convenient for you? That's why it costs willpower to follow that morality. Your job is tiring? Maybe deep down you don't believe it's serving your interests.

If you have a false belief about what you want, e.g. "I actually want to keep this prestigious position because yay prestige, even though I get tired all the time at work", well, that's a thing a lot of people end up believing, because nobody told them to use "things that make you tired" as a proxy for "things I don't want".

Obviously this has nothing to do with e.g. blood glucose levels.

Replying toCan we really prevent all warming for less than 10B$ with the mostly side-effect free geoengineering technique of Marine Cloud Brightening?

Fluttershy7y

Can we really prevent all warming for less than 10B$ with the mostly side-effect free geoengineering technique of Marine Cloud Brightening?

If you want to spend time predictably spinning in circles in your analysis because you can't bring yourself to believe someone is lying, be my guest.

As for the specific authors: the individual reports written seem fine in themselves, and as for the geoengineering one, I know a guy who did a PhD under the author and said he's generally trustworthy (I recall Vaniver was in his PhD program too). Like what I'm saying is the specific reports, e.g. Bickel's report on geoengineering, seem fine, but Lomborg's synthesis of them is shit, and you're obscuring things with your niceness-and-good-faith approach.

Replying toCan we really prevent all warming for less than 10B$ with the mostly side-effect free geoengineering technique of Marine Cloud Brightening?

Fluttershy7y

Can we really prevent all warming for less than 10B$ with the mostly side-effect free geoengineering technique of Marine Cloud Brightening?

b/c of doing the analysis and then not ranking shit in order.

Further down the list, we find a very controversial project, that is geo-engineering to reduce the intensity of incoming solar radiation to counteract global warming. According to a background paper, such investments would give a return rate of about 1,000. In spite of this enormous return rate, this is given moderate priority, apparently because it is deemed rather uncertain if this will actually work as intended.

> The lowest ranking accepted project, project no. 16, is called "Borehole and public hand pump intervention". This has an estimated benefit-cost-ratio of loess than 3.4.
... (read more)

Replying toSubagents, neural Turing machines, thought selection, and blindspots

Fluttershy7y*

Subagents, neural Turing machines, thought selection, and blindspots

Responding to your Dehaene book review and IFS thoughts as well as this:

On Dehaene: I read the 2018 version of Dehaene's Consciousness and the Brain a while ago and would recommend it as a good intro to cognitive neurosci, your summary looks correct.

On meditation: it's been said before, but >90% of people reading this are going to be high on "having models of how their brain works", and low on "having actually sat down and processed their emotions through meditation or IFS or whatevs". Double especially true for all the depressed Berkeley rationalists.

Oh, and fun thing: surely you've heard the idea that "pretty much all effective therapy and meditation and shit is just helping people sit down until they process their emotions instead of running from them like usual". Well, here's IFS being used that way, see from 4:51-5:32.

Replying toHow would a person go about starting a geoengineering startup?

Fluttershy7y

How would a person go about starting a geoengineering startup?

For the love of the spark, fucking don't. At least separate yourself from the social ladder of EA and learn the real version of rationality first.

Or: ignore that advice, but at least don't do the actual MCB implementation worldwide that costs a billion a year, talk with the scientists who worked on it and figure out the way that MCB could be done most efficiently. And then get things to the point of having a written plan, like, "hey government, here's exactly how you can do MCB if you want, now you can execute this plan as written if/when you choose". Do a test run over a small area, iterate and improve on the technology. B/c governments or big NGOs are more likely to do it if it's fleshed out, e.g. lower risk from their POV.

-4

Replying toCan we really prevent all warming for less than 10B$ with the mostly side-effect free geoengineering technique of Marine Cloud Brightening?

Fluttershy7y

Can we really prevent all warming for less than 10B$ with the mostly side-effect free geoengineering technique of Marine Cloud Brightening?

Thanks! This all sounds right. "CCC has interesting heresies"--was there stuff other than MCB and global poverty? It's an interesting parallel to EA--that they have interesting heresies, but are ultimately wrong about some key assumptions (that there's room for more funding/that MCB is sufficient to stop all climate change, respectively. And they both have a fetish for working within systems rather than trying to change them at all.)

Kinda a shame that leftists are mostly not coming to the "how can we change systems that will undo any progress we make" thing with an effectiveness mindset, though at least these people are.

-6

Willpower Thermodynamics

Fluttershy

10y

Edit 2019: By the spark, was everything I wrote before mid-2018 idiotic? Apparently.

Content warning: a couple LWers apparently think that the concept of ego depletion—also known as willpower depletion—is a memetic hazard, though I find it helpful. Also, the material presented here won't fit everyone's experiences.

What happens if we assume that the idea of ego depletion is basically correct, and try to draw an analogy between thermodynamics and willpower?

Figure 1. Thermodynamics Picture

You probably remember seeing something like the above diagram in a chemistry class. The diagram shows how unstable, or how high in energy, the states that a material can pass through in a chemical reaction are. Here's what the abbreviations mean:

... (read 599 more words →)

Dry Ice Cryonics- Preliminary Thoughts

Fluttershy

10y

Edited nearly a year later to clarify: dry ice cryonics probably won't work, for reasons hinted at in the post, and stated by Gav in the comments, regarding nanoscale ice crystals. It seems like there may be less of a tradeoff between fracturing and having ice crystals now than there used to be, especially if newer approaches involving e.g. cryonics with persufflation end up working well in humans.

This post is a spot-check of Alcor's claim that cryonics can't be carried out at dry ice temperatures, and a follow-up to this comment. This article isn't up to my standards, yet I'm posting it now, rather than polishing it more first, because I strongly... (read 1680 more words →)

Effects of Castration on the Life Expectancy of Contemporary Men

Fluttershy

11y

Follow-up to: Lifestyle Interventions to Increase Longevity

Abstract

A recent review article by David Gems discusses possible mechanisms by which testosterone and dihydrotestosterone could shorten the life expectancies of human males, and examines previous research on the effects of castration on male survival. However, Gems does not examine how age at castration affects how much castration extends one's life by, which this post does. In general, castration after puberty in males prolongs life to a lesser extent than castration before the onset of puberty.

Additionally, Gems' review does not estimate how long modern-day eunuchs might live relative to intact human males. Two of the other three known studies on the effects of castration on human life... (read 2856 more words →)

Efficient Food

Fluttershy

11y

Yudkowsky's 2014 April Fools Day's confession notes that food production could be more efficient:

Food in dath ilan was made by people who were very good at making a particular variety of food, and they’d pick a few dishes and make a huge amount of it on any given day. There’d be many places like that within 2 miles of you, and a small courier-carlike-thing would attach itself to another car and arrive with the food you liked within 2 minutes.

A quick Google search suggests that restaurants tend to spend around a third of their revenue on ingredients (more quick estimates of restaurant operational costs on page five of this slideshow). Of course, fast food and fast... (read more)

Tentative Thoughts on the Cost Effectiveness of the SENS Foundation

Fluttershy

11y

Edit from fucking 2019: this is all obviously wrong, EA is a scam, do all your own analysis of everything if you want to have an impact

It should be emphasized that back-of-the-envelope calculations, such as the one given in this post, ought to be adjusted to account for the fact that interventions can look much more cost-effective than they are, especially when the interventions were only shallowly investigated.

Previously, Givewell has looked into the cost-effectiveness of life sciences funding, as well as publishing a simple estimate of the impact of the average dollar spent on cancer research, which suggested that, in the past, each $2790 spent on cancer-relevant biomedical research in the US... (read 422 more words →)

Expansion on A Previous Cost-Benefit Analysis of Vaccinating Healthy Adults Against Flu

Fluttershy

11y

This post is an expansion on my post in main, A Cost- Benefit Analysis of Immunizing Healthy Adults Against Influenza (see http://lesswrong.com/lw/l81/a_cost_benefit_analysis_of_immunizing_healthy/). The purpose of this post is to examine different approaches to conducting the cost-benefit analysis given there, as well as to serve as an archive for a previous version of that post.

Conservative Cost-Benefit Analysis of Receiving the Flu Vaccine (for Healthy Adults)

The cost-benefit analysis of receiving yearly flu shots in the main article was conducted with conservative estimates. The decision tree from this analysis is reprinted below:

The utility which each possible outcome contributes to either receiving a flu shot, or to not receiving a flu shot, is given in the following table:

Optimistic... (read 2589 more words →)

A Cost- Benefit Analysis of Immunizing Healthy Adults Against Influenza

Fluttershy

11y

As of 11:30CST, 11/11/14, this cost-benefit analysis has been revised, in order to address concerns raised in the comments. See http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/l8k/expansion_on_a_previous_costbenefit_analysis_of/ for more on how the cost-benefit analysis was carried out, and on how varying certain parameters affected the determined expected value of receiving a flu shot.

Overview

The purpose of this post is to provide readers of LessWrong with a summary of what the literature has to say about the efficacy and safety of influenza vaccinations, as well as to weigh the costs of receiving yearly flu vaccinations against the benefits which healthy adults gain from vaccination. As illustrated in the "Cost-Benefit Analyses" section of this report, the expected value of receiving flu... (read 1628 more words →)